OpenAI has reportedly appointed Barret Zoph to lead its push into enterprise just a week after Zoph rejoined the company.

Amazon is preparing for another round of corporate job cuts next week, according to a report from Reuters on Thursday. Bloomberg also reported that layoffs could begin next week. We reached out to Amazon for comment.

Amazon laid off about 14,000 workers globally in October. The company indicated that more layoffs could occur in 2026 while it would continue to hire in key strategic areas.

Reuters reported that the latest cuts will be “roughly the same as last year.” The overall number of cuts could be the largest in Amazon’s history, exceeding the 27,000 positions that the company eliminated in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs.

In a memo to employees sent in October, Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti wrote that the company was “shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”

She added: “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”

There was speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Amazon and other tech giants including Microsoft have trimmed headcount while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. And software development engineers made up the largest group of employees affected by the layoffs in Washington state last year, amid the rise of AI coding tools.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also told employees in June that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.

But on the company’s earnings call with analysts, two days after the layoff announcement in October, Jassy said the cuts weren’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers. Instead, he framed it as a push to stay nimble, and said Amazon’s rapid growth over the past decade led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making.

Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021, has pushed to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company. Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more cautious hiring approach.

Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time the company provided a public number. At that scale, the reduction of 30,000 represents about 8.5% of Amazon’s corporate workforce. However, the number is a much smaller fraction of its overall workforce of 1.57 million people, which includes workers in its warehouses.

The company employs around 50,000 corporate workers in the Seattle region, its primary headquarters. There were 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state that were laid off last year in October.

Amazon reports its latest quarterly earnings on Feb. 5. The company’s stock underperformed relative to the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants last year. Some analysts predict that Amazon’s cloud unit will help boost the stock as AI demand rises.

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Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI's defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk's ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. "Previously undisclosed emails, messages, slide decks, reports, and deposition transcripts reveal how Microsoft pursued, rebuffed, and backed OpenAI at various moments over the past decade, ultimately shaping the course of the lab that launched the generative AI era," reports GeekWire. "The latest round of documents, filed as exhibits in Musk's lawsuit, [...] show how Nadella and Microsoft's senior leadership team rally in a crisis, maneuver against rivals such as Google and Amazon, and talk about deals in private." Even though Microsoft didn't have a seat on the OpenAI board, text messages between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman following Altman's firing as CEO in Nov. 2023 (news of which sent Microsoft's stock plummeting), revealed in the latest filings, show just how influential Microsoft was. A day after Altman's firing, Nadella sent Altman a detailed message from Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and top lawyer, explaining that Microsoft had created a new subsidiary called Microsoft RAI (Responsible Artificial Intelligence) Inc. from scratch -- legal work done, papers ready to file as soon as the WA Secretary of State opened Monday morning -- and was ready to capitalize and operationalize it to "support Sam in whatever way is needed," including absorbing the OpenAI team at a calculated cost of roughly $25 billion. (Altman's reply: "kk"). Just days later, as he planned his return as CEO to the now-reeling-from-Microsoft-punches nonprofit, Altman joined Microsoft's Nadella, Smith, and CTO Kevin Scott in a text messaging thread in which the four vetted prospective board members to replace those who had ousted Altman. Later that night, OpenAI announced Altman's return with the newly constituted board. If you like stories with happy Microsoft endings, as part of an agreement clearing the way for OpenAI to restructure as a for-profit business, Microsoft in October received a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI worth approximately $135 billion and retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vimeo is laying off employees around the globe just months after the Italian software company Bending Spoons acquired the platform for $1.38 billion, as reported earlier by Business Insider. Even though it's not clear how many people were laid off, Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, says in a post on LinkedIn that "a large portion of the company" was impacted.

Other former employees echo this statement in posts online, with one video engineer saying "almost everyone" at the company was laid off, "including the entire video team." Another software engineer says he was laid off along with "a gigantic amount of the company." Bending Spoons s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft has released the Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code to general availability, enabling teams to build, version, review, and deploy Copilot Studio agents using standard software development workflows.

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